Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Printing For Less

This is an advertorial

We all use printers these days. I remember the first time I ever saw a printer. My father bought it along with the home computer we had. That was a looong time back. Even before computers themselves had hard drives… the first computer we had was the one with those big floppy disks which we put in to play games like Alley Cats (or… I think Bubble Bobble? Man those were good days)

It looked something like this.

The printer we had though looked like it was made out of the same metal from this old computer. Something like this.

When printing it made as much noise as bunch of workmen drilling a hole into the ground to find oil. It wasn’t just loud noise. It was the screeching high pitched kind of noise. You know… something just a step below from a school teacher scratching her long nails on a blackboard.

I’ve been through many many generations of printers since then and learned lots of things. I’ve also ended up buying lots of different printers in my lifetime. Some for my home use (that sometimes seem to fail when I need it the most… like when I need to print my e-ticket hours before a flight) and some for the office.

For the home, I always end up buying a colour inkjet because they actually cost a lot less. Their cartridges cost a lot more than the cartridges of laser printers though so if you print a lot then a Laser printer might save you a lot of money. I don’t print that much at home so I opted for that.

I remember interning at this investment bank many years ago and printing a company’s Annual Report in colour. My Boss hauled me up and gave me a big scolding. I was naïve then…. You know thinking that the money investment banks make is limitless so why not pay more so I can read my Annual Report in COLOUR!!! I deserved the scolding I got… I know.

Today in the Nuffnang office though it’s a whole other thing.

I try to keep the Nuffnang office as environmental friendly as possible. Like during the day when the sunlight pours in from our big windows we don’t turn on many of the lights in the office.

Or that we have a policy where we only really print when needed. As much as we try hard to be paperless though some of my colleagues especially those in the Finance and the Admin part of the company use the printer a lot to print stuff. For that we end up using a laser printer since we don’t exactly print our Profit & Loss statements in colour. If My Hello Kitty ran the company though she might. She’ll probably make sure each Balance Sheet had a Hello Kitty Star on the top right corner of it.

The only other time we would use a colour printer in the office is maybe to print photos of our events and put them up on our Nuffnang Footprints Wall.

Recently though HP’s been running this campaign on Nuffnang about some promotions they have on their HP Photosmart and HP Officejet printers. The Photosmart I’m thinking can replace my dead printer at home and the Officejet works for offices.

If you’re getting a HP Photosmart printer you’ll get an additional Photo Value Pack that includes ink, HP Advanced Photo Paper and HP Photosmart Essential software. The printer even has a Color Graphic Display which makes viewing photos easier with its touchsmart frame. Plus to help with connectivity, the Photosmart 4780 is wireless!

If you get the HP Officejet Pro, you’ll get an additional High Capacity XL Black Cartridge with it. The 8500 is feature packed with built-in double sided printing, Ethernet networking and water resistant print outs. Good if you have an office that prints a lot. Cuts your cost-per-page into half and acts as a printer, fax, scanner and photocopy as well. We have one of these all-in-one things in the Nuffnang office too. Except that the one we have doesn’t print as fast :( . Maybe time to upgrade that one then we can have two printers in the office.

Like all good things, this promo doesn’t last forever. It ends on the 30th April 2010 (while stocks last).